


for all the bumps and bruises

by evienne



Category: Star Wars Legends: Allegiance - Timothy Zahn
Genre: Backstory (a little), Doubt, Friendship, Gen, Hanging Out, Helping, Hero Stuff, Post-Series, Pre-Series, Star Wars Legends Era, Team Feels, Team as Family, Yuletide Treat, rebellion era, spoilers for both Allegiance and Choices of One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-06
Updated: 2015-12-06
Packaged: 2018-05-02 16:06:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5254676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evienne/pseuds/evienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life is unpredictable. Daric LaRone knows this better than most people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	for all the bumps and bruises

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bluehooloovo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluehooloovo/gifts).



Daric LaRone grows up on a humble farm on a humble planet.

Life is sparse and difficult, and would be even without the long-standing threat of piracy. The roofs leak. There is often little to eat. Sometimes he falls asleep to the sound of his parents in the next room, discussing in low tones that sound close to despair how to manage for another month.  

But he doesn’t know any different, and later when he is asked, he doesn’t describe his childhood as unhappy.  

Unfulfilled, perhaps.

“I want to help,” is one of his first sentences, something his mother is fond of repeating to friends.

“He has a good brain,” she tells them. “And a better heart.”

Daric doesn’t understand what she means by _heart_ , unless it’s that he seems to feel things more strongly than other people do. Unfairness hurts him in a way that seems almost personal, even if he is not directly affected. He gets into more than one fight at school that way. He doesn’t always win, and it doesn’t always make him popular, but he feels better for trying.

But sometimes it’s not enough. Sometimes he dreams about bigger fights, about bringing a fleet of starfighters to Copperline and blasting their world into freedom. Sometimes he burns with it, with the desire for _more_ , with the conviction that he is meant for bigger things.

Other times, he’s merely the eldest son of a farmer, with twin younger brothers who are small and eager and impossible and always underfoot, whom he loves and never has any trouble admitting it. Other times, he resents his lot a little less, with his nowhere world and his dreams and his brothers.

“Make the best of things,” his mother tells him, sad and proud, and he tries.  

Life is hard but simple. His path through it seems straight.

Then the Empire comes in all its blazing brilliance, and he finds himself taking a sharp turn into a larger world.

***

The shoulder ID on the trooper who was just shot in the chest beside LaRone is TKR265.

This is LaRone’s first battle deployment as a stormtrooper. It’s nothing that all the training rooms and simulations in the galaxy could have prepared him for. He took his first life within seconds, and shortly after utterly lost count. Death is everywhere: in the scent of blasterfire and burning flesh, in the blinding flash of detonators, in the screams of both Imperial and Rebel casualties. It’s deafening, terrifying, sickening. His blaster clicked dry of Tibanna gas several minutes ago and his belt is empty of grenades. He feels worse than helpless. He can’t imagine why he isn’t dead yet.

But TKR265 isn’t dead either—not yet, anyhow, and maybe there is something he can do for him. LaRone throws his useless blaster aside, drops to his knee beside the fallen man, and yells for help. A second trooper, firing nearby from the cover of a battered speeder, sprints to assist.

Together they drag him behind a wall to relative safety. LaRone strips out his medpac and scatters the contents on the ground. “My ammo’s all out,” he tells the other trooper, hoping his voice isn’t shaking much. “Cover us.”

“Got it,” the other trooper says, leaving to take guard against the corner of the wall.

TKR265 is gasping for breath, chest heaving under the breastplate. LaRone lifts off the helmet to find a man about his own age beneath, with dark hair the color of LaRone’s brothers’ and eyes full of agony.

“You’ll be all right,” LaRone says, unable to think of anything but platitudes. He administers a full dose of symoxin for the pain first, then digs his fingers under the edge of the breastplate. “I’m gonna figure out where you’re hurt, okay?”

The trooper _screams_ as he pulls the armor piece free, a sound that pierces. He sees why when it’s off. The wound beneath is huge and ugly and LaRone knows with sick certainty even with his limited medic training that there is nothing to be done for this man. He meets the mute question in TKR265’s tortured eyes. Confirms it with a nod, because no soldier should be lied to. TKR265 nods back, biting his lip, and squeezes his eyes shut. LaRone doesn’t know what else to do but to take his hand and hold it tightly. He wishes he knew his name.  

The trooper at the wall glances back for a moment. LaRone thinks he glimpses sympathy in the set of his shoulders.

Minutes later, TKR265 draws a shuddering breath and doesn’t take another. LaRone, blood thundering in his ears and throat thick with helplessness, only realizes then that the firing has stopped and his commander’s voice is announcing victory. But he can’t seem to take his eyes from TKR265’s sightless ones. _I don’t know his name_ , he thinks again, and it feels like a new, personal failure.  

He jerks up at the hand on his shoulder. The other trooper is standing bareheaded at his side, helmet in his free hand, and there is no mistaking the sympathy in his face now.

“For what it’s worth, mine is Saberan Marcross,” he says, accent educated, and it’s only then that LaRone realizes he must have spoken aloud. 

Distantly, LaRone remembers when they gave him his number ( _this is your name_ ) and his armor ( _this is your skin_ ). He had been proud then, and tomorrow he will be proud again. But at this moment all he can think about is how lonely it must be to die this way. Dying in battle is not something he’s afraid of, but he doesn’t want it to be like his.

He takes off his own helmet and lets Marcross pull him to his feet.

“Daric LaRone.”

***

In principle, _your first and only allegiance is to the Emperor_ is a military mantra. In practice, Command isn’t usually much troubled by friendships springing up within ranks, which is probably more about them being too difficult to police than anything else. Even so, the implicit taboo on anything that might call one’s dedication to the Empire alone into question means that the term _friend_ is not one that stormtroopers use very often.

It would probably be an overstatement to use it anyway, LaRone considers. _Brother_ , a word to which the clone troopers (now outnumbered four to one by recruits) jealously guard their right, certainly is. He respects his squadmates, and likes many of them, but the sort of comfortable closeness either of those words imply simply doesn’t exist.

There are people who come close to being exceptions.

Grave is transferred in when LaRone’s squad’s sniper is retired after injury. He’s tall, friendly, supportive, with a temper that blows hot and brief, and is altogether utterly unlike his predecessor, who had fit the sniper stereotype almost to the point of parody.

“Not _everybody_ who carries a T-28 is an emotionless sociopath,” Grave comments a week after his transfer, cheerfully unoffended, while he takes out all ten targets on the practice range dead center. He leans on his rifle and looks at LaRone, grinning. “Or maybe we are. Maybe I’m just really good at hiding it.” 

(It would be hard not to like him.)

Quiller, a fresh graduate who joins the _Reprisal_ about eighteen months in, is a different kind: quiet, gentle, more likely to mediate than to start a fight. He used to drag-race airspeeders on his home planet—and win most of the time, according to the rumors. Then his parents signed him up to the Academy when he was eighteen, because they thought that if he was going to kill himself, he might as well do it in a good cause. (At least, that’s how Quiller explains it.)

LaRone asks once why Stormtrooper Corps and not the TIE program. It earns him a long flat look and an eyebrow raise from everybody in earshot.

“They didn’t want to make killing myself _too_ easy,” Quiller answers, straight-faced, and LaRone _laughs_.

Brightwater he sees less often, given that he spends the bulk of his off-time with his own squad. That changes a little when LaRone helps him fix his bike during a week-long stakeout when there had been nothing else to do. His sense of humor is blunter and drier than LaRone’s, which takes a little getting used to before it starts being funny. But he’s not interested in playing up the vague unspoken rivalry between scout and stormtrooper divisions, and that’s something LaRone, who has always been unity-oriented, can appreciate without any trouble.  

And, of course, there’s Marcross, who has been a given ever since that first deployment. By now, LaRone knows him as well as Marcross lets anybody know him, is well-acquainted with his reliability, his understatedness, his uprightness, how he’s careful with his words and reserved about his private life. He might even be the person LaRone trusts most in the galaxy, even if sometimes it feels like Marcross holds everybody at arm’s length.  

They’re exceptions, all of them, or nearly ones. Something more than teammate, still a little less than friendship. But there isn’t a word that perfectly describes it.

So that’s what LaRone calls them: Marcross and Grave and Quiller and Brightwater.

They are his friends, or one day they will be.  

***

“This is stupid.”

LaRone, standing guard beside Grave, can’t disagree with him. It’s well past sundown in Elriss’ winter and what little warmth the sun had offered is utterly dissipated. The wind is sharp and cutting; the rain doubly so. He’s protected well enough by his armor and its thermal insulation, but the inhabitants of an entire village corralled before them, clad in soaked woollen ponchos and sodden boots, are not so lucky. 

“They’re obviously not Rebels,” Grave mutters irritably.

LaRone holds his tongue. Grave sounds like his temper is on an even shorter fuse than usual, and there’s no point in fuelling the flame, risking him getting another warning for insubordinate behavior. The second check is nearly over anyway. Soon everybody will be indoors again, drying off by their heaters. They’ll talk about it later, alone, and Grave can blast his irritation out of him on the range.

Marcross, part of the inspection crew, comes to the end of his group, and heads to their commander to give his report. They exchange words, indecipherable to LaRone at this distance and through the sound of pelting rain, but Grave’s sniper eyesight is another matter.

“He’s telling him to do it again,” Grave murmurs, too much disbelief in his voice for anything else. “He wants them to run their IDs against the senate records.” A pause, and LaRone can feel the disbelief melt from him and ire start to take its place. “This is _so stupid_.”

Anger of his own begins welling up within LaRone despite his attempts to suppress it. These people are his own kind—familiar types on Copperline. People whose sleep is precious and health even more so. Days of work will be lost after these hours of exposure, to bronchitis, to fever: days of income they can ill-afford to lose. Some of them, he knows, will work regardless of illness, faced with starving their family otherwise. Overwork may exacerbate early symptoms into pneumonia or worse, and then—

Marcross is turning from the commander now, back straight and movements very formal. LaRone doesn’t often see him this angry. The firing range is going to be crowded tonight.  

“They must have a good reason for this,” LaRone says to Grave, but his tone is flat and he knows neither of them believe it.

This is the first time he truly doubts the Empire. It’s not the last.

***

The attack on Bompreil is savage, thorough, and over in a matter of hours.

“How many Rebels have we accounted for?” LaRone overhears his commander asking over the comm. The reply is indistinct, but LaRone, gazing out at the blaster-charred city and the bodies of civilians still lying in the streets, knows the number can’t be high enough.

They’d attacked _so quickly_. The instant the intel on the Rebel cell in Bompreil’s capital city was confirmed, they had moved in. All units, all at once. There had been no time to alert the city of their intent, no time to arrange even a partial evacuation. This is not the Empire LaRone knows. This is not the Empire he serves, this Empire that puts more value on the utter destruction of a small Rebel base than on hundreds of innocent lives.

The quiet whizz of a well-kept speederbike approaches from behind and Brightwater pulls up into hovering position beside him. He says nothing for a long moment.

“I threw some of those detonators,” LaRone says without looking at him. “Some of these civilians lying here. I did that.”

“I was on perimeter duty.” Brightwater’s voice is carefully neutral. “So I kept them here in the kill zone.” He pauses. “Those were our orders.”

LaRone flinches a little, because it sounds far too much like the rationale he’s been repeating to himself all day. It’s been less convincing every time. The wind shifts direction; the smell of burnt flesh on the air is perceptible even through his helmet filters. It turns his stomach.

“You on cleanup?” Brightwater asks.

“Yes.” He volunteered for it. If the Empire fired the shots, the least it can do is to help dig the graves afterwards. It’s only a small thing compared with the enormity of what has been done, but it’s all he has.

“Word is the city is having a memorial tomorrow. We’ll be flying out before that.”

LaRone thinks about Copperline, about how it felt when the Empire came and freed his world. He remembers the troopers and officers staying for the fete after the final pirate nest had been destroyed; how they made grand speeches and accepted with smiles the gifts and presentations from the grateful Copperline people. It’s easy to bask in triumph, he thinks. Harder and more honest to stay and face one’s mistakes.

“They don’t want us here, LaRone,” Brightwater points out quietly.

He knows Brightwater is right. Not just about today.

“I remember when they did,” LaRone answers, voice and heart heavy, and pulls a stretcher towards the nearest body.

***

“We aren’t here to ask questions.”

“There’s got to be more to the story.”

“There wasn’t another choice.”

These are phrases that LaRone is beginning to get tired of hearing. They’ve started to sound a little tattered with overuse, a little less like genuine reasons and a little more like easy excuses to shrug off responsibility. That’s what makes him uncomfortable about them. It’s not like he threw away his conscience when he signed up. 

“We are what the Empire wants us to be,” Quiller reminds him. “And these days, compassion isn’t part of it. It’s not— _criminal_ , a lack of compassion.” But he doesn’t sound happy when he says it.  

LaRone is pretty sure that if _it’s not criminal_ is the best defence they can come up with for the Empire’s actions, things are probably even worse than he thought.

***

One night he wakes, shaking, from a nightmare of screams. He barely makes it to the refresher before heaving up every last thing in his stomach.

In six months, Quiller will say, “The Empire left us.” This is the moment that LaRone will think of when he says it. This is the moment, lurching unsteadily over the latrine on cold tiles, that he first realises it, even if he doesn’t understand why.

Not until morning.

That’s when they learn about Alderaan.

***

When he departs the _Reprisal_ alongside Marcross, Grave, Quiller and Brightwater for a new life, it’s without regret.

***

It’s not, however, without difficulties of its own.

Everything with Drelfin and the Rebels and Jade and Shelkonwa happens so quickly that it takes them all a little while to realize what life together on the Suwantek actually entails. That this is it for them forever: the five of them against the galaxy in a ship that seems smaller with every moment of hyperspace.

At first, it’s fine.

Maybe a little _too_ fine, if there’s such a thing. Maybe they all dance a little too carefully around each other for a little too long. Lots of _please_ and _thank you_ and _would you mind?_ Lots of being careful of everybody’s space and knocking on everybody’s doors and letting everybody have their say. None of which is a bad thing, except that the politeness between them feels strained and artificial, like they’re all trying too hard to keep the peace when there wasn’t even a fight to start off with.

It just needs time, LaRone tells himself. It’ll work. It’ll come together.

Except it doesn’t. 

At first, it’s just a sharp word here and there, quickly apologized for. That’s not so bad. But the words get sharper as the days pass, the apologies don’t follow quite so rapidly, and then they don’t follow at all. All of a sudden it seems like everybody on the ship is angry at each other, and they’re all expecting LaRone to _fix_ it, when he hasn’t the faintest idea how.

“I didn’t ask for this,” he groans to Marcross, and starts seriously daydreaming about drudgery on Copperline.

Marcross cracks one of his rare smiles and looks encouraging. “You’ll think of something.”

***

(He does, actually, think of something.

It’s probably a stupid something, but he’ll try anything.)

***

“This is a kids’ blastertag arena,” Grave says once they’re all assembled at the coordinates LaRone sent them, which prompts Brightwater to mutter something unnecessary like _nothing gets past you, does it?_

“Yes, it is,” LaRone interrupts before another argument can start. He prays for patience. “But you’re going to be using your regular weapons. I’ve hired out the whole place and paid off the managers, so there’s no risk of anybody else getting hurt.” He opens the weapons case in the back of the speeder and start handing out blasters.

“You’ve dialled the energy down on this,” Quiller says, frowning at his blaster settings.

“I’ve done it to everybody’s,” LaRone says, handing Grave’s rifle over and passing E-11s to Marcross and Brightwater. “At that level it’ll burn if you get hit, but nothing permanent or debilitating. I’ve tested them on me,” he adds and pulls up his trouser leg to show the bacta patches on his shins.

“You shot yourself,” Marcross says flatly, looking both pained and impressed.

LaRone rolls his trouser leg back down. “Just getting a headstart on the rest of you. Don’t get me wrong—it _hurts_. That’s part of the point.”

“What _is_ the point?” Brightwater asks, wearing the half-scowl that seems permanently fixed to his face recently. “We just going to play blaster tag all afternoon like a bunch of kids?”

“Yes,” LaRone says, and the word comes out sounding pointed even though he doesn’t really mean it to.

Brightwater has the grace to look a little ashamed.

“All right,” Marcross says, holstering his blaster and clearly beginning to evaluate the field for tactical possibilities. “What are the rules?”

“No rules,” LaRone says, shaking his head. “Free-for-all. Best kill/death ratio gets bragging rights for the week.” He fixes each of his men in turn with a sudden, hard look that feels just as unfamiliar to give as it must be for them to receive from him. “You got a problem with somebody here, you shoot them until it’s out of your system. Okay?”

Success: he startles smiles out of all of them. Guilty, self-conscious smiles, but smiles all the same.

“And then,” he continues, “after we’re through, we’re all going to _talk_ about our problems. I said at the start of this that the last thing we need is private resentments, and I meant it.”

There’s quiet then, real, actual quiet for maybe the first time since they boarded the Suwantek together. It’s an introspective and a self-evaluative and a chastened quiet, not the stubborn silence LaRone had worried about. He’s underestimated them, then. He’s relieved to see it.   

“Understood, sir,” Quiller says at last for all of them, strict and formal. “What do you say, give us five before open fire?”

“Five minutes,” LaRone agrees, and switches his comm to loudspeaker. “All right, men. Scatter.”

***

(It’s _such_ a stupid something.

But it works.)

***

There’s no lack of jobs to keep them occupied. It’s often harder to figure out how to prioritize them than anything else. A month ago, LaRone would have found it depressing, the amount of corruption that just a small corner of the galaxy can contain. Now, with the means to back up the will to do something about it, it’s oddly stimulating.

They average about a job a week. Some don’t take much: only need a stormtrooper presence and the application of a little well-placed pressure, and the vote is recounted, the goods returned, the scam shut down. Others are longer and require stake-outs and shoot-outs and regrouping and replanning. But they all end the same. In victory. The Hand of Judgment might close the day with their trooper armor in pieces, down to fumes of Tibanna, sporting new burns and bruises and bacta patches, but they win. They always win.

“Think our luck’s going to run out?” somebody asks at least twice a fortnight, after the last close shave.

LaRone doesn’t know the answer. But he doesn’t, somehow, think so.  

He’s got four good men and justice on his side.

He has a good feeling about this.

***

Sometimes things get a little bizarre, like that time on Catena they all get gassed by some kind of compound that is deadly to Catenians but apparently only makes humans feel really, really _high_.

LaRone doesn’t remember finishing the job, except for the strong conviction that they must have done it _awesomely_ , because that’s how he feels. They’re sprawled out in the common room of the Suwantek, half-undressed out of their armor and no further. Everything is amazing and hilarious, or deserves deep thought, or possibly both.

“You were great,” LaRone tells Marcross, who is sitting on the floor intently studying the grip on his gloves near LaRone’s feet. “I was great. We were all great today. Good job, guys.”

“ _I_ was great,” Brightwater says happily. “I _shot_ them. On my bike. None of you can ride a bike.”

“I could,” Quiller says, who is the only one trying to adopt the advice given by the Catenian medic to try and sleep it off and is slumped next to Brightwater with his eyes closed.

“Maybe you could,” Brightwater allows. “But the rest of you.”

“You took forty billion shots to take out the leader,” Grave scoffs, which LaRone thinks might possibly be an overstatement, but equally well could be nothing more than accurate. Recalling a sense of scale is not a priority. “ _I_ could’ve done it in one.”

“Yeah, well, you _didn’t_.”

“ _Could_ have,” Grave retorts, and rolls off his seat to start fumbling through the pile of weapons and armor scattered in the middle of the room. LaRone lurches to his feet, dimly aware that what’s likely to happen if Grave gets his hands on his rifle is very bad, but Marcross evidently has the same thought and gets there first.

“No,” he says, pulling the blaster away from Grave, who glares at him. Marcross looks like he’s trying to think of something more compelling to follow up with, but settles eventually for just repeating: “No.” And then: “Bad.”

“Give it back,” Grave whines, grabbing for it. “I’m telling Mom.”

“Mom says no too,” LaRone says, making his way over and not-very-effectively kicking the rest of their equipment out of Grave’s reach. They feel heavier than he remembers, and harder. He should have kept his boots on for this.

“You’re not Mom.”

LaRone thinks about it for a long moment, and then says, definitely: “Yes, I am.”

“Yes, he is,” Brightwater puts in, and beside him Quiller is nodding solemnly.

“Come on,” LaRone says to Grave, picking up his arm and half-dragging him back over to the couch. “You just lie down.”

“I’m good at sniping,” Grave says, voice plaintive, clambering up onto the seat again.

“You’re very good at sniping,” LaRone agrees, both comfortingly and sincerely, and wedges himself between Grave’s feet and the armrest. His head is odd and light but this feels _important_ to say, and also very true _._ “You’re all very good at lots of things. I’m proud of you. All of you.”

What he says seems to pierce the haze a little: they all look more alert and definitely pleased, from Marcross still sprawled on the ground to Quiller, who has even opened his eyes, the better to take it all in.

“Yeah, well,” Marcross says, and pats LaRone’s foot, uncharacteristically affectionate. “Our mom knows what he’s doing.”

***

It’s almost worth getting shot, LaRone thinks, if it means that he gets to see how much his men care about him.

He considers blaming whatever drug Marcross finally managed to get into him (after who knows how many failed attempts at cannulation when the automatic hypo broke) for the thought. But that would be disingenuous. He’s always been a sap; he’s just starting to show it more these days.

He took two shots to the chest and stomach during a raid on a slaver den this afternoon. He remembers thinking distantly that something about the sensation was _off_ before collapsing, and then Grave swearing about outdated projectile weapons as he took out the shooter, Brightwater and Quiller surging past to suppress the continuing attack, and Marcross frantically trying to stop him from bleeding out on the floor.

“You do _not_ get to die today,” he told LaRone in the middle of it all, voice grim and hands red, and LaRone, head swimming with blood loss and pain, thought _you’ll be a better leader than you believe when I’m gone._

But Marcross got it right after all. LaRone wakes to the taste of bacta in his throat and a circle of concerned faces. He counts them first—four, all accounted for—and then draws a breath that doesn’t hurt as much as it ought to.

“You get them?” he asks.

“Every last one,” Brightwater confirms, sounding like it wasn’t satisfaction enough.

“The slaves are in government custody,” adds Grave. “By the way, we’ve decided you’re going to learn how to dodge.”

“Or shoot first.”

“Or become immortal.”

“Seriously, though, boss,” says Quiller, voice mock-stern. “Don’t do that again.”

LaRone finds Marcross, who has said nothing so far. He meets LaRone’s eyes with a brief smile and puts a hand on his unbandaged shoulder to squeeze it for a moment.

“Thanks,” LaRone says, including them all. “You did a lot for me.”

They _all_ just sort of smile at him then with a kind of tolerant fondness, as though he’s a small child who’s just said something so obvious it crossed the line into absurd.

“We’ve only got one of you,” Grave says simply, and that seems to be answer enough for everybody.

Then he pokes at LaRone’s bruised arm and he and Brightwater start ribbing Marcross on his medic skills (“wow, Marcross, I think we just found the reason why everybody thinks the Corps can’t aim”), while Quiller wears a grin and earnestly advises LaRone that he’s _got_ to kick that spice habit, Commander.

LaRone smiles and closes his eyes to the sound of their voices. They’ll be there tomorrow.

***

So maybe their lives these days sound like the plotline to a terrible daytime holodrama, but LaRone loves it. He loves the tangibility of what they’re doing. He loves leadership, strangely enough, when it was never something he aspired to. He loves seeing the gratitude and relief in people’s eyes. A part of him even loves that they have to do it in secret.

(“Well, yeah,” Grave says, like it’s obvious. “Who didn’t grow up with the superhero dream?”

That’s when Brightwater makes the mistake of revealing that the kids at school always made him play the bad guy, Grave cackles delightedly—“ _this explains so much_”, Quiller takes Brightwater’s side, Marcross takes Grave’s to even it up, and then for the next two hours the Suwantek goes to war.)

Most of all, though, LaRone loves the people he lives with. Quiller’s quiet sense of humor and steady dependability. Grave’s loyalty and passionate sense of justice.  Brightwater’s direct wit and quick mind. How Marcross is always just a step away and sometimes—many times—knows him better than he knows himself. They make him laugh and they make him proud, and they do it every day.

Once, he’d felt that _friend_ was too strong a word for them.

Now—well. It just doesn’t seem nearly enough.

***

Sometimes they talk about what to do when they finally hit the expiry date on all their ship IDs, their equipment, their credits.

Quiller suggests the Outer Rim, where the Empire has less presence. Marcross campaigns for more central systems on the logic that it’s easier to hide in a crowd. Brightwater thinks they shouldn’t tie themselves down to just one planet forever. Grave doesn’t much care except for claiming absolute veto power over the climate.

And LaRone, listening to them debate back and forward, wonders if anybody is going to point out that maybe the best solution is for them to simply split up and go their own ways.

“It’s an option,” he says when he finally can bring himself to suggest it, trying for objective. He knows how he feels, but it’s not fair to make it harder on the others if they don’t agree. “It might not have to be the Outer Rim, or poorly colonized systems. One or two people can hide out a lot more easily than five.”

He meets with complete silence, and for a long moment he is genuinely not sure if it’s motivated by relief or the opposite.

Then Brightwater says, with characteristic bluntness: “We’ll leave in bodybags. Not before.”

Nobody disagrees.

Maybe it should disturb LaRone a lot more that such a macabre thought cheers him up so much, but he’s not disturbed _at all_.   

***

When the answer comes, it’s unexpected, like most of the things that have happened to them in the past three months.

“I don’t think we’ve got a choice,” says Quiller in the middle of their discussion about Thrawn’s offer, but what he really means is _if we’re choosing between running and helping, we’ve chosen already._

LaRone thinks about the swoop gang on Drunost, about the first time they fought together and realized what they could do. Thinks about ignoring Jade’s order to stand down. Thinks about all the times they might have left it all behind, and didn’t.

The simple truth is that his friends are too capable—too skilled—too _good_ to be wasted on a life in exile.

“No,” he agrees later on. “We don’t.”

***

“He meant uninhabited when he said it, didn’t he?” Quiller comments quietly as they enter their new home planet’s atmosphere.

Nirauan is a sort of muted brown all over, at least from this angle. LaRone sees only wide stretches of dull-looking forestry punctuated by watercourses and craggy mountain ranges. Nothing in the way of buildings or infrastructure visible, although Thrawn had mentioned a fortress, so they merely must not be in sight of it yet. It’s not what he expected, somehow: such an ordinary-looking world on the edge of known space.

“Plenty of airspace anyway,” Quiller goes on. “Thrawn said they had a few fighter squadrons. Be interesting to see how they handle atmosphere.”

Grave says: “Won’t take much to set up some open-air ranged training areas.”

“And a lot of the big wide outdoors,” Brightwater observes. “Maybe you stormtrooper types can finally learn some actual survival skills now you can’t scab off your scout team anymore.”

Marcross joins LaRone at the viewport as the conversation between the other three starts to devolve into good-natured squabbling. For a moment, the two of them are silent as they watch the world grow in size beneath them.

“You’re still not sure about this, are you?” Marcross asks at last.

LaRone keeps his voice neutral. “It’s a bit late for second thoughts.”

“It’s fine to have doubts. Doubts got us here.”

LaRone pauses to consider. It’s not exactly doubt he’s feeling, he thinks. Nerves, perhaps. Or regret? Leaving the Empire aboard the Suwantek had been a decision fuelled by adrenaline and desperation, without time to consider or other options to pursue. This feels different. More calculated, more deliberate. More like maybe they could be making a mistake.

“I suppose,” he says, “that a part of me always thought maybe we’d be able to go home again one day.”

Marcross shifts. “I thought you hated farming.”

“I do.” He wouldn’t go back to live. But it would be nice to visit: to see his parents and his brothers again, maybe open their eyes to the universe beyond Copperline. It seems wrong that he joined the Empire to make a difference, and has never done anything for the world he was born on. “But you think about Shelkonwa sometimes too.”

“Sometimes,” Marcross admits. “Not a lot, but yes.” He adjusts his grip on the viewport balustrade and looks out, up at the clear sky. “Maybe we will go back someday. We ought to know better than anybody else that things change.” He pauses and adds in a matter-of-fact voice: “I guess if it turns out we like this Empire as much as we liked the last one, you could just accidentally shoot Thrawn too.”

LaRone chokes on a startled laugh. “You are literally the least funny person I know,” he scolds, recovering, but Marcross is grinning now as well. He dodges the punch that LaRone aims at him, and LaRone switches tack to lean his elbow on Marcross’ shoulder instead.

“Don’t give up, Marcross, one day you’ll land a joke,” Brightwater quips, ambling across with Quiller and Grave to join them. He folds his arms on the viewport balustrade on LaRone’s other side, rests his chin on his forearms. “So, Commander. What’s your take on this place?”

LaRone drops his free hand down on his shoulder affectionately, Marcross still close, while Quiller and Grave crowd in as well. Brightwater looks up at him, a half-grin on his face. The uncertainty at the pit of LaRone’s stomach eases all at once. This is what he’s had for the past several months, after all, isn’t it? These men, this team. He trusts them. He believes in them. He _loves_ them.

And he knows, from the bottom of his heart, that whatever happens on this world or any other, they can take it on together.

(Whenever he thinks about his past, it looks like a path with several turns in it, and it begins on a nowhere world, with dreams and with brothers.

That’s the thing about turns, though. Make enough of them, and sometimes you find yourself somewhere close to where you began.)

A smile spreads across his face. He feels tranquil. He feels _grateful_.

“I think,” LaRone says at last, voice warm and his family close, “that we’re going to handle it just fine.”  

**Author's Note:**

> Allegiance fic has been on my mental wishlist for so long, thank you for requesting it! And for the chance to play around in this particular sandbox of canon one last time before the TFA release. :)


End file.
